1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to speech recognition and more specifically to increasing accuracy of speech recognition.
2. Introduction
Many businesses use speech recognition applications to save money automating customer interactions. However, speech recognition systems can be unreliable and slow. Speech recognition system can be costly and difficult to maintain. Speech recognition system can also frustrate customers when they are not accurate. The desire to increase speech recognition performance is part of every speech application. Recognition accuracy when completing automatable transactions can dictate business cases and return on investment. Currently in the art, speech recognition systems capture historical caller selections to determine which options are most likely to be selected by callers. Such speech recognition systems create weighted grammars to guide caller responses to the most frequently selected options. For example, a speech menu presents six options to a caller (option a through f). The call history indicates that users select “option a” and “option b” 60% of the time and the remaining four option have an even 10% select rate each. The speech recognizer, as known in the art, builds a speech grammar with all six recognized options, applying weights to the selections to increase recognition probability consistent with selection rate percentages. In this example, the grammar would be better in recognizing “option a” and “option b” since they are weighted higher. The problem with this approach is that grammars for different answers can be incompatible and conflict with each other. A grammar that is tailored to the top two answers may not respond well to user input selecting options other than the top two. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved way to recognize speech in response to multiple prompts.